Fernando Rezende da Cunha Junior

Thesis: Social networks: integrating new technologies into secondary education classrooms in Brazil

Research supervisor: Bert van Oers

I am a PhD student at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, under the supervision of Professor Bert van Oers and co-supervision of Professor Michalis Kontopodis.

My current research is entitled “Social networks: integrating new technologies into secondary education classrooms in Brazil”, and focus on how teachers and students integrate the use of digital media in classroom from a Cultural Historical Activity Theory perspective. Considering the social networks as a mediation tool for the activities in the research project, and also the concept of Zone of Proximal Development as basis for understanding the collaborative aspects of interactions among the subjects, we analyze how the communicative process evolves in time and how the cultural and historical aspects impacts the development of the research.